


The Man in Chains

by Lady_in_Red



Series: The Lion of Lannister [5]
Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Gen, Post Season 6, show canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-25
Updated: 2016-08-25
Packaged: 2018-08-11 00:49:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7868680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady_in_Red/pseuds/Lady_in_Red
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jaime pleads his case after learning who has taken him prisoner.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Man in Chains

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry for the lengthy delay between parts. Travel and work conspired to keep me away from writing for longer than expected.

The chains stayed, and the girl stopped hiding her face. 

She’d been a child last time he saw her, chasing cats through the Red Keep in dirty breeches, a little heathen with the same spirit as her unfortunate aunt Lyanna. Whether he remembered her face or not, Jaime would have known her at once. The girl was every inch a Stark. Not pretty so much as handsome, with dark hair and grey eyes, small but not at all delicate. Arya Stark. At this point Jaime wouldn’t be surprised if Bran Stark opened his cell door next, or even Catelyn.  

Arya was a far more calculating jailer than her brother or mother. She refused to say a word about Brienne, no matter how many times he asked. Instead she waited until Jaime was eating, then she told him about finding Meryn Trant in Braavos. How he preferred whores so young they hadn’t yet flowered. How he took his pleasure in defilement and pain. 

While Trant’s perversions were new to him, Jaime was not surprised just how low the Kingsguard had fallen. The time of swordsmen like Arthur Dayne was long past. Robert had instead allowed his small council to give Kingsguard positions in exchange for coin or power. 

By the time Arya described how she’d put out Trant’s eyes before slitting his throat, Jaime was glad of the man’s death. Then he told her how Trant had stripped and beaten Sansa in the throne room at Joffrey’s command, how Tyrion had saved her. The girl gave no sign whether or not she believed him.

No longer left in complete darkness, Jaime could now tell how many days passed. After three days, he asked for news of King’s Landing. Arya only smiled with sharp teeth bared and told him that she was in the feast hall of the Twins, the night Jaime and his men arrived with Edmure Tully. 

“I didn’t see you.” Everyone in that hall would have seen her, known her for a Stark, even those so far in their cups they could scarcely stand. 

“I saw you,” she said, a young woman who might have passed for a boy in her breeches and tunic before her hips and small breasts grew to curve against the roughspun. And now he remembered her, a fierce little thing, snarling and fighting and calling Joffrey a liar, sobbing about how the Hound had killed her friend.  

Now Arya’s voice was flat, her eyes knowing, her lips curved in a nearly imperceptible smirk. She could have disappeared in the Free Cities, hidden away in Braavos playing the courtesan with wealthy men as if they were puppets. Instead she’d become a killer. Arya took one step closer to him, still well out of arm’s reach. Jaime was chained, but she wasn’t stupid. “I could have killed you, too.”

“You poisoned him.” If the girl was so eager to claim kills, he might as well be sure she was telling the truth. Jaime had heard about Trant’s death from the other knights who’d accompanied Mace Tyrell east. She’d been accurate enough that he had no reason to doubt her, but the Freys were another matter entirely.

The smirk broadened. Arya’s eyes glittered savagely as she looked down on him. “I slit his throat. But you knew that. I killed the sons too. Stuck a finger in the old man’s pie, told him he was eating them.”

She was toying with him, a cat with a trapped mouse. Trant wasn’t the only one who took pleasure in torture. “If you’re going to kill me, do it. Otherwise I want to speak to Brienne.”

“No.” No child should speak with such authority. Few kings managed it. Even Aerys cloaked in his madness had sounded less certain.

And Jaime would not let a slip of a girl thwart him, not after traveling hundreds of miles and ignoring his sister’s summons. “That’s not up to you, little wolf.” 

Arya shook her head. “Nor you, Kingslayer. She doesn’t want to see you.”

Anger suffused him, heating his chilled body. “Ask Lady Brienne when she became so craven that she can’t face a chained cripple.” 

Arya dropped into a crouch on the floor, as if she needed a closer look at him. “How did you know it was her, in here?”

“I didn't.” If he’d known Brienne was so close, he wouldn’t have allowed a Stark to break him, even for a moment.

She looked at him oddly, the same unsettling appraisal Qyburn had given his putrefying stump. “You're an excellent liar. I almost believe you. But she didn’t.”

“I have done many things, far worse than you. But I have never lied to Brienne.”

Arya rose and moved to the door, gave it two sharp raps. The pattern changed every time, guaranteeing an unwary guard wouldn’t let him out if he overpowered her somehow. “You said you loved her.”

_ I’ve failed everyone I ever loved, why not her, too?  _ Simple words for something that complicated his life so much.

The door opened, the bloody sunset spilling across the dirt between them. “Good riddance to Walder Frey and his brood, but why Trant?” he asked. “You didn’t know what he’d done to Sansa.”

The girl hesitated. “He killed my dancing master, Syrio Forel.”

Jaime almost laughed, but the way the girl spoke, with reverence, warned him to hold his tongue. “You killed to revenge your brother, your mother, and even the dancing master you scarcely knew. Yet the Hound still lives. I suppose the boy he ran down wasn’t terribly important to you.”

“Don’t mock me,” she snapped.

For a moment Jaime was back in Harrenhal, Brienne standing furious above him, steaming water cascading down her strong, unexpectedly womanly body. “I jumped unarmed between Brienne and a bloody bear. I gave her a Valyrian steel sword. Why wouldn’t I come looking for her when your sister told me Brienne was missing?”

She looked back, the light making a dark halo of the hairs escaping from tight coils around her head. “Words are wind, Kingslayer. And when you came North, you brought an army.”

* * *

A taciturn man with a mouthful of rotten teeth delivered Jaime’s sparse meals the next day. He did not linger, and neither Arya Stark nor Brienne came to his cell. 

Jaime had not slept, turning over his words, his actions, trying to see them through Brienne’s eyes. He’d done all he could for her at Riverrun, he’d told himself that a hundred times as he sat in that tent calmly destroying Edmure Tully, and half a hundred more as he rode into the castle, as he watched her slip away on the river. 

By the time he’d sat in Walder Frey’s hall, the very hall where Lady Stark and her son were betrayed and slaughtered, Jaime had had trouble justifying taking Riverrun. The Blackfish had few men, fewer resources. He was a wily foe, but Jaime admired him for besting the Freys. He’d earned the castle, and he’d held it with fewer men than the Freys had squandering in losing it. Taking it back, letting the old man die, those were not acts Jaime took any joy in, but he’d done it anyway. At his sister’s command.

Ned Stark had once sneered at him in the throne room, spat that Jaime had served when serving was easy. Ned Stark had no idea how hard it had been to stand outside the queen’s door while the king savaged her, nor what it meant to be a hostage against his family’s good behavior. Stark might have asked Theon Greyjoy that and spared his sons a brutal death, but no, Lord Eddard Stark knew better than anyone else. For all his celebrated honor, Stark had been just as arrogant as Jaime. 

Even now, his white cloak nothing but a memory and his father’s mantle heavy on his shoulders, Jaime served. He’d brought an army north, just as Cersei commanded. They sat waiting at Moat Cailin, poised to wipe out the last remnants of rebellion in the North for good. And Jaime’s meager plans for them seemed so easily thwarted. If he’d ordered them to march for Casterly Rock without him, would they have done it? Or had Cersei given his captains their own orders, to ensure Jaime’s cooperation? That seemed far more likely than his sister extending him her full and complete trust. 

Jaime ought to be plotting his escape. Brienne was alive and well, likely on the verge of returning the second Stark sister to her ancestral keep. She didn’t need Jaime. She might hate him, but she was safe. He’d missed her calm, her strength, her stubborn, selfless honor, had hoped to feel the warmth of her faith in him again, if only briefly. If that faith was broken, he ought to march his men south, away from Winterfell, back into the fray of whatever fight remained between his sister and Daenerys Targaryen. 

But he hoped his taunt would rouse Brienne’s temper enough to seek him out one more time. ‘Ask her when she became so craven…’ Calculated, those words, to take her back to their captivity, when all they had was each other. Jaime could only hope that Brienne would listen to him before she ran him through with his own sword. 

* * *

Light flickered on the walls when Jaime woke with a start, blinking up blearily in search of its source. The torch anchored to the wall had long since guttered out, and he’d surrendered to a fitful sleep in darkness. 

A lantern rested on the dirt floor near the door, its light casting Brienne into a mountain of steel capped with pale, shadowed skin and wavy hair the color of hay. Her eyes watched him, hard as the line of her mouth. Even unarmed she looked imposing, unyielding. 

“Brienne.” The relief he felt poured out in his voice, and he watched her brow furrow in confusion. 

“Ser.”

The terse formality of that scalded him, made his arm ache, his swordhand locked around a blade he would never hold again. “Jaime. But you never let yourself call me that.” His voice was just as scathing, remembering all the insults he’d thought about her in their early days but never voiced out of some misplaced sense of honor. “No, you kept your distance, hid behind your courtesies, your vows.  _ Ser  _ Jaime.” He laughed. “I loved that, you know. Thought it meant something. I always was a fool.”

For a moment, her face softened, showing that sweet hint of vulnerability he’d witnessed so rarely, leaving her momentarily bared to him more than when they’d been naked. Then her back stiffened, her hand going to her unarmed hip as if by reflex. “Your army waits to invade the North on your command.” 

“My sister’s command,” Jaime corrected. “She wanted me to take Winterfell, kill Jon Snow, and bring you and Sansa Stark back to her in chains.”

Her eyes flashed, her lip curled. “I won’t let you do that.”

Jaime tested his chains. Still in place. She took no chances, then. So dedicated to keeping him at arm’s length. It only made him itch to touch her, even if she broke his hand for taking the liberty. “I never intended to. Sansa wrote to me, asked for your safe return. She thought I’d captured you.”

Brienne’s eyes met his, some of the cold leaving them. “She would not risk such a thing.”

Jaime shrugged. “She asked for your squire, too. Where is young Podrick?”

Brienne glanced toward the door, but said nothing. 

Understanding dawned. “Podrick is my guard tonight. And he let you in.” Jaime stood, eased toward her as much as his chains allowed. “The others don’t know you’re here.”

She hesitated, and he saw the conflict in her face. “They want to ransom you.”

“To whom? Cersei, who would rather throw wildfire over the walls, or Daenerys, who supposedly has dragons? Wildfire, dragon fire, it won’t make much difference. Either way, Winterfell will look like Harrenhal in the end.”

Brienne turned her back on him, took a few steps into the shadows. Her hair was getting longer, curling at the ends against the nape of her neck. “I went to Moat Cailin. I overheard some of your men talking. Your sister was alive last they heard, but the city was under siege. Your captains want to turn back south, but they fear your sister’s wrath if they return without you.”

Jaime could see it all too clearly: Cersei bellowing orders from her precious throne with a goblet of wine in her hand and the Mountain at her side, dragons wheeling above the city, soldiers massing at the gates. “They should go. If you have ravens I’ll write to them, order them back. I should have offered days ago.”

Brienne turned to look at him, but her face was still hidden in the gloom. “We have no ravens. A rider, perhaps, but our path is north. I can’t let you return to your men.”

Jaime sought out the shine of her eyes in the dimness. “Take me with you. I promised Jon Snow I’d bring you to Winterfell. Let me prove what I say.”

She stepped forward, into the light, wariness and uncertainty etched in every line of her face. Her wide, mobile mouth and expressive blue eyes. Something stirred in him each time he saw her now. Perhaps Arya was right to call it love. All his most impulsive, foolish acts were to protect the people he loved: his sister, his brother, his children. And Brienne. 

“The decision is not mine alone. I must speak with the others.” She started toward him, reconsidered, and went to the door instead.

“Brienne.” Jaime was loath to be alone again, not at all happy to put his life in the hands of Arya Stark and the Hound. 

She looked back. “Why are you here?”

Considering he was chained up in a cell, that question served only to anger him. “I was knocked out and locked up, by your orders or that murderous little wolf. The Hound would have killed me there in the woods.”

Brienne grimaced, her hand moving to graze her hip again. He wasn’t sure what to make of that gesture. He’d noticed it at Riverrun too, how often her fingers strayed to Oathkeeper’s hilt. “Jaime.” His name held both a rebuke and an apology.

His name. Just that, no titles, no slurs. There’d been no softness in her eyes, no affection in her voice the first time they were together this way, Jaime a prisoner in chains and Brienne towering over him. He didn’t need any wine tonight to make him confess. “I had to find you before Cersei sent someone else. Someone with orders to drag you back to King’s Landing so my sister could watch the Mountain slaughter you in front of a thousand smallfolk. In front of me.”

Her lips pursed, and Jaime knew even as her mouth opened what she would ask. “Don’t,” he snapped. “Don’t you dare ask me why.” He faltered at her look, like he’d struck her. “You know why, Brienne. You’re in my blood. Have been for years.” 

Brienne’s face reddened, her chin trembling. She turned away and rapped on the door. She took the light with her when she left.

 


End file.
